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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

This is completely anecdotal of course but for the 8 years I've been running watercooled PCs (admittedly professionally built), I never had a leak. Or a pump fail for that matter, but even if one did fail, the CPU will shut off.

Furthermore, you are supposed to use distilled water or non-water based coolants with high electric resistance.

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Shameless plug but I’ve built a bunch of water cooled computers and even the more reliable ones like the Swiftech build below with John Guest push fits (rated for 25 years use) do eventually leak.

https://www.leonroy.com/oldsite/img/IMG_1802%20(Large).JPG

Regarding distilled water, it is indeed not very conductive at all but it is also quite reactive and if it touches electrical traces and PCBs starts to leach ions from the surrounding until it starts to conduct at which point the machine will short circuit (speaking from first hand experience alas).

OK then, big assed Noctua fans it shall be for me.

I did this for my 3950x, and it works well. The temps on the CPU still spike up quickly and generate a bit of fan noise under brief loads, but apparently that's quite standard for this platform.

Are you happy with the 3950x? I’m looking at the 3950x and 3900x. I’m not sure if the extra $250 is worth it. It’s replacing a i7-7700k so either one will be a nice upgrade.

There’s a base clock frequency drop that comes with the higher core 3950X that I don’t think is worth it for the prosumer, unless you really do a lot of multitasking.

Virtualization, 4K Plex Transcoding, and other Video Transcoding. It would also serve as a home Flask api that will save data collected by various Raspberry PIs and thermostats. All purpose Linux home server box.

A toss up if you ask me. I think you’re fine with the 3900X and putting them money elsewhere where you’ll get better bang for your buck.

Both the base clock and max turbo clock are never reached with my Ryzen 3950X. It tends to run at about 4450 MHz single core and 4020-4220 MHz all cores. Mainboard is the marginally suitable Asus Prime B350-Plus, cooler Thermalright Macho Direct (for height reasons).

My point is: the official base and turbo clocks are not that relevant. Typical clocks can be found in product reviews.

I've been running a big ass noctua on my 5930K (first intel 6 core) for a solid 6 years now on a 4.2GHz overclock. No problems whatsoever, other than the thing doesn't want to do 4.3 anymore, but it was always a bit unstable when i was running at that speed. I'm sure I'll update soon though.

Do you have any experience with the factory-built watercool systems? Didn't Corsair have some years ago?

Seems like it would be easier to make a "never disassemble" system not leak.

For the closed loop systems (4) I've been using for nearly a decade I haven't encountered any leaks. knocks on wood I've only had a fan die after 3-4 years of 24/7 use.

Corsairs do leak https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/6jk7kj/my_sec... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwVxFEdyoYc https://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=123712&page=2 etc

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